Data sources and methodology
Where every number on this site comes from, which ones are estimates, and what we no longer publish.
What this site does not have
It used to publish live Grand Exchange prices — item pages, margin screens, a catalogue of every tradeable item. All of that is gone.
It was removed because it was expensive to serve rather than because it was wrong. Two thousand item pages regenerating against a price feed is a large amount of bandwidth for a site of this size, and the choice was between paying for it and spending that effort on the writing instead. Anything on this site that mentions a price now is an estimate in an article, with its assumptions stated, and it is not fetched from anywhere.
For live prices, the RuneScape Wiki real-time price API and the wiki’s own pages are the right places to look, and they are the source this site read from when it had them.
What it does read
One thing: the item catalogue — names, ids and icons — from the same wiki API, refreshed weekly, because it only changes when Jagex adds an item. That is what turns “Ranarr weed” in a sentence into the right sprite beside it.
Grand Exchange tax
2% of the sale price, rounded down, charged per item. Sales below 50 GP are exempt, the tax is capped at 5,000,000 GP per item, and a short list of tools and the bond are exempt entirely. Full detail on how GE tax works, and the tax calculator applies exactly this rule.
This is a game rule, not market data, which is why it survived the removal of everything else on this page. It changes when Jagex changes it and at no other time.
Item images
Item icons are the OSRS Wiki’s, served through our own cached route rather than hotlinked. Each image is fetched from them once and served from our cache thereafter, which is less traffic for them than hotlinking would be.
Quest requirements
Skill and quest prerequisites, experience rewards and the items a quest cannot be finished without are factual game data. Where we have not confirmed something in game ourselves, the item lists are read from the quest infoboxes on the OSRS Wiki and condensed: items the quest hands you along the way are dropped, because a list you pack a bank trip from should not include them, and conditional items keep the condition that makes them conditional.
Walkthroughs are a different matter and are not taken from anywhere. We write our own or leave the section empty and link to the wiki, which is why some quests here have full routes and others say plainly that we have not written one yet.
Game mechanic constants
Values set by the game rather than the market — the tax rate and cap, the experience curve, the combat level formula, bone experience values — are held in single locations in our codebase so a change can be corrected everywhere at once. The experience table is generated from the game’s formula rather than stored, so it cannot drift.
Jagex can change any of these in an update. If a figure matters for a large decision, confirm it in game.